EN EREBOS PHOS
Photo
Like the formation of the image of Christ on the Veronica Veil and the Turin Shroud, […] In some circles, spirit photography was considered a no less miraculous and portentous phenomenon than the origination of these relics: both classes of image recorded an unexpected portrait — an image that (according to natural law) should not be there — and were, alike, evidential, permanent paranormal artefacts that purported to attest to the prior, real presence and supernatural nature of the represented subjects.
[Spirit photographer Ada Deane] also drew on the iconography of the pseudo-photographic relic. In a portrait of her taken in the 1930s, she smiles benignly through the folds of a translucent pall, purportedly made of ectoplasm, which frames and isolates her face in the manner of the kerchief depicted in paintings of the Veronica Veil.
Left: Francisco de Zurbarбn, The Veil of St Veronica, c. 1635, oil on canvas | Right: Ada Deane, ‘The spirit guides “Stella” and “Bessie” with Mrs Barlow, Fred Barlow, Violet and Ada Deane’, detail from a gelatin silver print, 1920.
— John Harvey, Photography and Spirit, 2007
[Spirit photographer Ada Deane] also drew on the iconography of the pseudo-photographic relic. In a portrait of her taken in the 1930s, she smiles benignly through the folds of a translucent pall, purportedly made of ectoplasm, which frames and isolates her face in the manner of the kerchief depicted in paintings of the Veronica Veil.
Left: Francisco de Zurbarбn, The Veil of St Veronica, c. 1635, oil on canvas | Right: Ada Deane, ‘The spirit guides “Stella” and “Bessie” with Mrs Barlow, Fred Barlow, Violet and Ada Deane’, detail from a gelatin silver print, 1920.
— John Harvey, Photography and Spirit, 2007